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An anonymous reader writes "Would you buy a Ferrari and put regular gas into it? I don't think so. So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards? If you want to find out how much better a high speed memory card is, check out this group test of high capacity compact flash and SD cards."

You'd think cards developed to the same spec would have equal performance. Is that really not the case with SD or others? Interesting article.

I don't know about SD cards, but CF cards are compatible as IDE devices, which itself has various specs with varying performance. Various PIO and DMA modes, etc. This would be like comparing hard drives and then saying, "You'd think drives developed to the same spec would have equal performance".

Some cards are built using high density, low speed, low durability CF, while others go for lower density, high speed, high durability CF and multiples of them in one card. Some newer fast cards employ DMA modes over PIO. Also don't forget, the spec itself is not always the bottleneck, so individual models can vary in performance up to the limit of the particular spec used.

Like the spec that says a car has four wheels and steering wheel, yet the performance of a Ferrari is markedly different than that of a Geo?Most of the specs define physical and electrical characteristics, the speed and performance is somewhat abstracted, the device will tell you when it's done, or when it want more data, and can do so in it's own sweet time.

You pay for performance. The higher performing silicon is available in smaller quantities, and commands a premium. Either because the die operates at t

Most of the specs define physical and electrical characteristics, the speed and performance is somewhat abstracted, the device will tell you when it's done, or when it want more data, and can do so in it's own sweet time.

Interface specs usually do define signal rates and word size (for parrallel). So specs usually do define a top speed. Certainly in the case of CF.

(Of course serial interfaces also define word sizes and sometimes allow for various sizes, however that typically does not change the bits/second rate by much, if at all, depending on the spec.)

Exactly. And people would be wise to remember that. Take the whole USB vs 1394 arguments that come up from time to time. Some people insist that since high speed USB 2.0 runs at 480Mbps versus Firewire's 400Mbps, USB is *obviously* faster. Nevermind the fact that 480/400 are signalling rates that have absolutely nothing to do with throughput. Speaking as a USB developer, the spec just says that when a host or device sends a 512 byte USB packet, it goes down the wire at a speedy 480Mbps.But the spec doe

Some specs allow for variation in performance. For example, if the raw performance of the memory cells is expected to increase significantly, the spec will be designed to allow for the highest speed expected to ever be achieved (or the highest speed economically feasible), but to allow devices to negotiate a slower speed by doing things such as inserting delays. i.e. the spec defines compatibility and not performance, AS LONG as performance can be negotiated to be the lowest common denominator of two devices.

I have heard stories of some of the highest speed cards breaking in older readers, perhaps the autonegotiation was designed with the assumption that cards would always be slower than a reader's capabilities, or those readers aren't fully meeting the specification and no one noticed.

I have heard stories of some of the highest speed cards breaking in older readers, perhaps the autonegotiation was designed with the assumption that cards would always be slower than a reader's capabilities, or those readers aren't fully meeting the specification and no one noticed.

Most early USB 2.0 (not USB 1.1) readers just plain don't work. Even using the words "high speed" with those readers makes me laugh. They fail at USB/1.1 speeds.

Precisely. I was vaguely interested in the article - will a more expensive card improve the shooting speed on my camera? I wondered, or more precisely - would it reduce the delay between being able to take pictures?

Page 2 of the article: "many of our digital cameras have limited write speeds too, so the full potential of these so-called high-speed cards will be restricted.".

The Rob Galbraith DPI website has a huge database [robgalbraith.com] of performance with various cards and various cameras. I use this as a benchmark for deciding when I need a new CF card vs. the Camera I have, and the family of camera I'd love to upgrade too one day.

"You can't put regular gas in a Ferrari?" No, most high end cars require preimium gas."What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff?" Premium gas has a higher octane number which prevents pre-detonation, aka "knock", which allows high performance engines to operate at higher compression ratios.

" Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?" No, most every gas station I have been to in my life sells "regular", "silver", and "

That's a good, simple, clear, and concise explanation. But it leaves a couple of important questions unanswered. How is a fancy camera like a high-performance car? And how is brand-name memory like high-octane gas? Comparing a digital camera to a Ferrari is bullshit.

Probably not in America. Everything at a filling pump is assumed to be of a certain quality over here in the UK.

Erm.... Just about all petrol companies offer different octanes. Standard unleaded in the UK is 95 octane, which is a lot higher than the US I think. BP offer "ultimate", which is 97, Shell offer a 98, and Tesco offer a 99. Most others offer higher than standard octane too - where do you buy petrol?

OT - As an aside to those in the US, it's horribly expensive, £1 per litre, which is

I mean for me to drive home to my folks place is equivalent to [roughly] driving entirely from one end of England to the other. And I don't even leave the province I'm in to do my trip!!! Talk to me when you live in a country that is 3000Km wide about the price of gas.

That and yeah, if oil wasn't traded in USD you'd probably have an easier time buying gas. Of course the next logical choice is the euro, not the pound. So you're still fucked.

Gas of that octane here is getting up there in price, but your taxes are a *lot* higher. Regular in the U.S. is always 87 octane, mid-grade is usually 89 octane, sometimes 88 or 90 at some oddball stations, and premium is 91 or 93 octane. Right now in Columbia, Missouri (town of ~90,000 in central Missouri, home to the University of Missouri) 87 octane is $2.79/gallon, mid-grade is $2.79-$2.92/gallon (the 10% ethanol mid-grade is the same price as regular unleaded as there is a lot of ethanol produced here,

There are different methods for rating octane. RON, MON and (RON+MON)/2 are the major ones. I think the UK uses RON and I know the US uses (RON+MON)/2. RON is always a larger number than MON for the same fuel.Another US vs World rating issue is stereo amplifier power. In the US we rate in RMS (Root Mean Squared) or more simply, average power output. In much of the rest of the world they rate in peak power. In PP a stereo might be rated as 200W but in the US that same stereo could perhaps only be rated as

To add to your comments, some manufacturers state RMS on amplifiers without stating the amount of distortion they get out of it...You could buy a high end amplifier that gives 50W RMS/stereo channel @.007%thd... whereas you could buy a low-end 100W RMS/stereo channel @ 1%thd, and I would bet the 50W amplifier would sound "louder" or "better" on the same speakers, all other things being the same.

Of course, once you start buying low enough, it seems that Manufacturers can twist the #s to mean whatever they w

If I recall correctly, UK pumps display RON, or Research Octane Number. It is often higher than the MON, or Motor Octane Number. Pumps in the US display the average of the two, sometimes known as the Anti-Knock Index.In the US, we've got regulations as to a minimum quality for gasoline two, and many places have mandatory forumulation changes in respect to the seasons (more oxygenates for winter, etc.)

See, that's why in the UK we tend to smile at jokes about us having lots of weird small cars.:-)

Where I live in the US, regular gas (I think it's 87? 88?) is $2.89/ gallon on a good day, up to about $3.05. My car's pretty gas efficient, and I get 300 miles on about $35.

My maths may be off, but that means your car gets 25 mpg. When that answer appeared on my calculator, I literally laughed out loud. In the UK we'd refer to that as rubbish efficiency (trends for ludicrous urban SUV usage notwithstanding). 15 years ago I had an ancient piece of crap Morris Minor [wikipedia.org] that did 35+ mpg, ffs.

My mother's car costs closer to $60 for the same distance.

14 mpg?! Holy crap. What is it, a Chieftain tank?!

Never mind game console standby power usage, get your car manufacturers to sort out their fuel efficiency. If you had to pay UK prices at the pump, I'm guessing that might accelerate the process:-)

Of course, in the UK, the cost of petrol is largely taxation. It's something like 75% of the price, which usually gets people going [wikipedia.org].

If you bother to convert all those numbers, why not include SI so that the rest of the siviliced world can understand too? FYI, the offical SI unit of fuel efficiency is firkin of water per furlong [wikipedia.org].

As a Brit living in the US I can attest to the fact that (a) petrol is a lot cheaper here and (b) lots of people drive absurd cars with terrible fuel consumption. However, one thing which might alleviate your concerns a little is to know that the US Gallon is smaller than the UK Gallon (1.2:1). So those numbers probably aren't directly comparable.

My maths may be off, but that means your car gets 25 mpg. When that answer appeared on my calculator, I literally laughed out loud. In the UK we'd refer to that as rubbish efficiency (trends for ludicrous urban SUV usage notwithstanding). 15 years ago I had an ancient piece of crap Morris Minor [wikipedia.org] that did 35+ mpg, ffs.

1-Higher octane fuel will not increase carbon buildup.2-As a car gets older, it does not need higher octane fuel. The idea that even a severe case of combustion-chamber carbon buildup could cause a measurable increase in compression ratio is silly. As a car ages, its compression ratio tends to decrease due to ring blow-by, and carbon buildup preventing the valves from sealing well.3-Higher performance cars often need higher octane fuel because they run at a higher compression ratio, run hotter, and therefore have an increased likelihood of pre-ignition.4-If you car was designed for 87 octane, and it is knocking during acceleration, that is NOT good, and is often a sign of a timing issue you should fix, not mask with higher octane fuel.Even occasional knocking during heavy load conditions is bad, as it can cause damage to the engine. Fuel pre-ignition not only causes waste heat (leading into the cycle of more pre-ignition), but the shock of pre-ignition on a rising piston can cause a great deal of damage if allowed to continue for very long, which is (one of the reasons) why many modern cars have knock detectors, and retard the timing if it is detected.

I think they meant, would you put regular (85 or 87 octane) gas into your Ferrari, instead of ponying up the extra 20 cents a gallon for premium (91 or 93 octane).Higher octane gas resists burning better. In a high compression engine (or a turbo/supercharged engine), the extra pressure can make gas detonate instead of burn. That detonation is bad for the engine. Lower performance engines don't put as much stress on the gasoline, so they can burn lower-octane gasoline. Putting high-octane gas in your low

Just to expand a bit...Actually relating to the ferrari question, if Ferrari tells you to put regular gas and a cup of water into the gast tank, you put regular gas and a cup of water in the gas tank! THEY designed the engine. Back in the 50's engines were so inefficent that it didn't make much of a difference, but with all the sensors, and gizmos on modern engines to get a better burn you need to put the correct octane in your car.

Some engines produce less power if you put a higher octane than the car is

Even running an engine with no oil in it to lubricate the moving parts and reduce friction will not break metal, it will simply reduce the power and efficiency of the engine.

Run a typical combustion engine with NO lubrication and you will get increased friction and thus increased heat and thus eventually a seized engine which might even include pistons which have welded themselves into the cylinder.

It has been adjusted, usually through adding chemicals, to burn a little slower. Too low of an octane for the engine's compression leads to knocking. Messing with the timing can fix some of this, but not all. Basically, if your car doesn't specify high octane, and it isn't pinging/knocking, you're better off with the cheap stuff. It's what your engine was designed for.

Now, a higher compression engine is more efficient and has more power for the displ

So what, you get taller pistons, or ones with a different surface shape that makes the space in there smaller ?

They'd be slightly domed, rather than flat. It doesn't take much. Taller pistons might require a different head (depends on the spacing). Another option is to shave the head, but that's more difficult to reverse if you have to. 30x->x becomes 30x-y -> x-y, increasing the difference between piston in the low postion vs the high position. (x=volume of chamber under full compression, y=volum

Some engines require higher octane fuel to prevent detonation though. If I put 87 octane in my car and start up my datalogger, I see knock and it kicks the timing back a few degrees to prevent it. The car runs at reduced efficiency. If the timing wasn't backed off it would detonate the fuel, which means it explodes instead of burns. This generates increased temps which can burn holes in the pistons. If it cannot back off the timing anymore, like on a hot dry day, it will start backing off the boost (tu

well, don't you know that one is supposed to always use bad car analogies in anything related to computers ?
More to the point, if you, like many of us can only afford, have a Ferrari that is more than 15 years old (say a Mondial) , it is better to use cheap oil (with characteristics appropriate to the car) than modern, expensive, synthetic oil, which is too fluid.

You can't put regular gas in a Ferrari? What's the difference between regular gas and this special stuff? Does that mean when you buy a Ferrari you spend half you life looking for Ferrari-approved filling stations?

Someone (with a lot of money) bought one of Schumacher's old F1 cars and yes, it was contractually required that the car only be run on a specific brand of fuel.

The article summary is pretty oblivious though- you run the octane your car requires, 95% of the time. Gasolene companies love to make you think that filling up your low-compression engine (that requires 89) with 94 octane will make it faster, or "clean" it more. All grades of gas from the same brand have the same level of detergents, generally...furthermore, each kind of detergent is good at removing certain deposits but leaves others, so you're actually best off rotating which brand you fill up with. If you're obsessed about it, just pop in a bottle of Techron cleaner one tank before your next oil-change; it's the stuff BMW, Audi, and others recommend, though they'll charge you a lot more for Techron in a BMW or Audi bottle.) Also, most gas is delivered from port by a distributor that slosh-mixes in a bottle of stuff that "makes" the gas Exxon, Shell, Hess, BP, whatever. When a supertanker crosses the ocean, it doesn't have a "Shell" crude compartment and a "Exxon" crude compartment, etc. It's all the same stuff, a commodity...even though Shell likes to run commercials saying their gas meets manufacturer standards blah blah blah. EVERYONE's gas does, because EVERYONE's gas comes from the same damn crude, gets refined at the same places, and distributed by the same companies.

This is similar kind of "inadequacy" based BS. High end digital cameras have large buffers in part because flash memory is so effing slow; a Nikon D70 has enough buffer for something like 40 full resolution JPEG shots! Running a slow memory card in them won't harm them, damage them, etc etc. There are other factors to consider as well- my canon 10D has a 9 shot buffer for RAW shots, and some sort of in-between buffer for writing them to the card. I used to hit the end of the buffer all the time, because I never noticed that it wouldn't process the buffer while the shutter was held half-down in the focus position. Talk about a design flaw- but knowing that, I kept my finger off the shutter button whenever possible if the buffer had anything in it (displayed in the viewfinder) and the problem disappeared.

As someone who has shot with a semi-pro dSLR for more than two years, I can summarize that article in one sentence: "if you need to shoot images as fast as possible and have a camera with a limited buffer, buy the fastest card within reason, only if Rob Galbraith's tests show it'll make a substantial difference. Otherwise, buy a reasonably heard-of brand with a decent warranty in case it stops working." Why? Because just like with the gas, under the label you'll often find exactly the same thing- and only a very small number of people actually NEED the extra speed of a card that costs 50%+ more.

Oh, last piece of advice: don't buy huge memory cards. Three reasons: 1)you pay more per MB, usually. 2)You put all your eggs in one basket- if you drop a card and step on it, accidentally hit "erase all", or loose it... you get the idea. 3)"Photo tanks" with laptop hard drives offer MUCH cheaper $/GB storage. You could shoot 2,3,4,5GB/day in RAWs on a big vacation and still not fill the smallest of these widgets after a week. Buying one without a drive and putting in the old laptop drive you've got hanging around from an upgrade (provided it's not too power-hungry) is the way to go, as even 30-40GB is a BOATLOAD of space for digital photos.

Oh, and should you be on a trip- bring a few DVD-Rs, and burn the files to one or two if you really want to have the photos. Laptops get stolen/dropped/lost/seized/whatevered, and you can be absent minded / mistake-prone about transferring photos after a week of fun in the sun (aka rm -rf * type mistakes). Put one set in your suitcase, another set in your SO's/friend's/etc.

Why is there always someone who posts this comment. No shit, OMG PONIES firefox has ad blockers.

That doesn't mean putting a single page story on 20 pages is any more enjoyable to read.

You fucking karmatrolls are fucking annoying. You're like the little 6 yr old trying to get the attention of his parents or something. Shut the fuck up already until you have something insightful to say.

I agree with the GP. People doing that are more annoying than the spam articles. It's spamming Firefox. Nobody ever posts "What ads? I'm using Opera's built in ad-blocker!" or "What ads? But I'm using privoxy!"

The only reason those posts aren't modded to -1 offtopic instantly is because it's Firefox. Pretty lame, since its ad-block plugin isn't even that good.

You know, it's interesting, going down this list [slashdot.org] of "trusted reviews." Most are submitted by "an anonymous reader" and none of the reviews are very professional--and they take up page after page in order to increase ad impressions. It's ridiculous! I don't usually take time out to criticize the editors, because it's generally off-topic and for the most part they do a decent job, but let's stop falling for anonymous submitters looking to increase ad impressions, okay? Start by rejecting stories from this so-called "trusted" reviews site.

When I bought my camera 6 months ago, I searched and searched, and found there was simply no way to know what performance to expect from a given card / camera combination. Labelings like "32x" apparently don't mean a whole lot, the same card doesn't work equally well in all cameras, packaging and labeling are not changed when the card is re-engineered, and there are so many different cards available that no benchmark table is even nearly complete - often there's no overlap at all between the cards used in a benchmark and the cards available from a chosen vendor.

Only if you purchase my special green marker for $19.99 and write a green line around the edges to prevent electron scattering. Those stray electrons can really show up in photos and you wouldn't want that. You also get higher definition too. Yeah, that's it!

I'm still waiting for the first review that says a particular card gives warmer colors or cleaner pictures.

That's actually determined more by the USB cable you use. Thinner cables are gonna give you better color rendering. Of course if you work in black and white, it doesn't matter. Go ahead and use the cheap stuff. But with color, you don't want multipath blurring your color signals together. And this gets even more important as you shoot multiple frames per second.

And the same thing goes with your storage media. If you work in high resolution color, you need a RAID. That way, you can spread the put the color streams on different physical media to prevent color-bleed. This is even more critical with digital photography, just a one-bit bleed from one pixel to another can ruin a great photo.

So, by all means, get a cheap card if you are going analog black-and-white. But you get what you pay for if you are shooting high-res digital color.

When I buy a Ferrari I usually sell it straight away. Then proceed to buy the latest monster setup from Alienware, take a journey around the world, put half of what is left on a high-interest bank account, and donate the other half to Médecins Sans Frontières or the Red Cross.
So there you have it!:p Straight on topic hehe...

There was one proper torture test done by the UK Digital Camera Shopper magazine where they dipped in cola, run through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled and then for sport hit with a sledgehammer and then nailed to a tree. They didn't survive the last two tests though...

What blows my mind in this issue is not the memory cards, but the cameras themselves. A friend of mine just bought a new Canon camera. Sorry I don't recall the model, but it was the newest 8 megapixel SLR they had. Nice camera, he paid a lot for it too. It takes full motion movies. He took my advice and got a 1gb card for it. So we take a few movies and some pictures and plug the camera into their new iMac. And wait. and wait. and wait some more. My god, why is this going so slow? It's been 10 minutes and it's not even 10% done!

The computer shows the camera is hanging off the USB FS (full speed, 12mbps) bus. Why? Is there a problem with the computer? Get out the manual for the camera. Oh.. my.. god... the camera is USB full speed, not high speed. (this is a difference between 12 mbps and 480 mbps for USB cable download speed!) I had to look in several places to confirm the horror. What were they thinking? This camera takes 200mb movies. That takes HOURS at that speed to download.

So we shuttle back down to the camera store and bought him a nice firewire card reader. Back home, we dump then entire card in 10 minutes, movies and pictures included.

This is inconvenient but gets the job done. There is simply no excuse to pay thousands for a camera that takes movies, and have the manufacturers shave a little off the price of manufacturing by substituting a slow USB chip in the camera. And that's all it is, one teeny little chip they just picked the slow one over the fast one. (they are functionally interchangeable, there is no need to redesign the camera) At the bulk they buy chips that can't have saved them more than a dollar per unit.

I have owned two Canon cameras myself and then there is this one. They have performed very well in all cases as excellent digital cameras. But incidents like this make me seriously consider changing brands. If that would have been my camera purchase, it would have gone right back to the store where it came from. Go to store, go directly to store, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

Stop right there... none of Canon's SLRs can take movies. The burst shooting mode has been used to make sort of stop-motion movies, but that's not full motion by any stretch of the imagination. Also, all of Canon's current SLR line has hi-speed USB.

So what camera are you talking about, anyway, since it's obviously not a Canon dSLR?

I know the Canon line-up pretty well, they have three 8mpx DSLRs - 350D (Rebel XT); 20D (discontinued); 30D - and all of them have USB 2.0, none of them does more than 5fps. The last camera I can think of that might not have had USB 2.0 was the 1Ds or 1Ds MkII - it had firewire instead.

That's because the USB is 480M/s burst speed where the firewire is 400M/s continuous. So, for short bursts the USB will beat the firewire, but any transfer longer than a few seconds and the firewire will always win out. That continuous speed is also why firewire is the standard in digital video editing. There is nothing worse than a jumpy input when you are scanning video.

I was interested in checking out this review, then i saw i would have to page through 20 pages of, well, pages, to make sure i hit their quoat of ads. No thanks, ill read up on fast memory at somone elses site.

Yes, i am aware that half the pages on the internet are like this, and i am also aware that the website owners need to make money. I dont care.

You must have missed the well-labeled drop-down menu that lets you jump directly to whatever page you want.:-P I checked out the intro, the SD roundup, and the conclusions with no intermediate pages. Done!

I, personally, buy a camera with the goal of taking good-quality pictures. I buy a memory card with the goal of storing a lot of stuff. I will admit that transfer speed is on the priority list . . . it's just not very high on the priority list. So this isn't anything like "buying a Ferrari and putting normal gas in it". This is more like "buying a Ferrari and eating a McDonald's burger in it". It doesn't have much effect on what you bought the item primarily for.(I mean, unless you get secret sauce on the s

If you have an SLR and are taking pictures of moving objects, like planes or cars, you're going to be using the multiple capute modes to be taking 5-10 pictures with every button press, and snapping that button like mad as the object flys by.

If you're memory card can't keep up with the camera writing the data, you won't be able to take very many rapid-fire pictures before the buffer fills up. You could miss the best shot because of that.

I have an expensive ($800) Digital Rebel XT 8MP camera. It doen't matter how slow of a card I put in it, it works great. It has it's own high speed cache to store like 8 pictures or so depending on settings, and write to the card seconds later. I can easily take a few shots a second, but, it's rare I need to shoot that. While some high end cameras have the write to card weakness, it's certainly not universal among the Ferrari Cameras.
Those of you driving around in old yugos might need every bit of speed increase that you can get, you're better off getting a better camera though IMHO.

I know convenience is the only thing I should worry about but my camera's memory has beautiful saturation, 25 million pixels and proven image stability of over one hundred years; all in a package no bigger than a cassette of Kodachrome. Oh, wait...

That's 36 shots in that package, and they cost at least $0.50 each when everything's included. When I was recently on Safari I took over 5000 shots in a week - with your materials that would have cost $2500 and filled up a pretty decent sized case. As it was it cost nothing (I already had the cards) and everything fitted on my laptop. Sure it's partly a matter of convenience but if I were using film I simply couldn't have taken the shots I did - film was expensive out there and in short supply, and luggage

Aaargh..19 small pages, each framed with 3 giant ads..I can't see! I can't read! the noise, the agony! Sorry, had to click away. So, what was the spammers conclusion about memory cards? How many ads can it hold?

They used USB2 readers. USB2 is 480Mbps - theoritical - or about 60MB/sec. Some of these cards are have more than 50MB/sec read/write, so it seems very likely the testing is being compromised by the actual USB2 speeds. There may be a much larger difference amongst cards than they found.

The other limitation I noticed is that they timed based on when the windows "copy" dialog appears and dissappears. But whats to say it won't continue writing for a while after that (from cache?)

Even at 5 frames per second my Canon EOS 20D SLR cannot write faster than my memory card can accept even though I'm using a plain "slow" CompactFlash. There is no reason to buy "high speed" cards unless you have a lot of extra money making your wallet heavy. And, just to clarify, yes I would put regular in a Ferrari. Unless you have a high-compression ratio in your motor, regular gas will perform *exactly* as well as premium. It always amazes me how much the marketplace relies on ignorance for profit.

I can easily exceed the rate of whatever memory I put in my Nikon D70s when I shoot pictures back to back. Then again, I often shoot in raw mode to allow me to perform better post processing of the images. Each image is 5-6MB in size, so at 3 pictures per second the flash will not keep up. The faster flash definitely makes a difference if I am shooting a lot of pictures, since the raw buffer is only 4 pictures.Granted, the higher end cameras have larger buffers which helps mitigate the problem, but faste

Really, how can you have a roundup of CF cards without any from SanDisk? They're only what, the biggest company in that market? And they just released a new line of CF cards that they're touting as "the world's fastest cards" so this would have been a good time to see how good the performance of their products really is. Maybe instead of picking four random CF cards, Trusted Reviews should have just stuck to the SD card side of things this review, and then they could have done a more comprehensive CF card review in a future article. That way, they could have hit people with twice as many ads.

Far be it from me to point out flaws in other peoples tests but these guys are using card readers which are simply slow. Getting 2.2 MB/sec write speed out of a Lexar Pro 133x CF card is pathetic, see more realistic results here (as well as tests on real cameras):

In the Photography Forums [dpreview.com] that I tend to read we get the "which CFcard is best" question several times a week and everyone always refers the poster to the tables from the Rob Galbraith test last year [robgalbraith.com]. They actually have a number of different pages, having tested cards with a number of different cameras, but that doesn't matter, nor does the fact that it's currently a little out of date - the salient fact is that for many of the expensive flash memory cards the bottleneck is the camera's write speed.

I currently have two CFcards for my camera, a cheapie that came free with the camera & a SanDisk Ultra II. The SanDisk Ultra II was about twice the price of the cheapie memory, but it'll also write about twice as fast. The Extreme III, however, is what SanDisk are currently pushing as their fastest highest-tech card for your camera, and loads of people buy it. Check the table, however, and you'll see it's only a couple of percent faster in my camera... and at twice the price, of course.

So this is why the Rob Galbraith tables [robgalbraith.com] are more useful than some 19-page review full of ads - you can just glance down the page & easily compare the brands that your supplier offers for a real-world comparison and see if they're worth the price.

Another (and I think better) comparison site is here [robgalbraith.com] and it has also compares different cameras in conjuction with different cards, which is fantastic if you have one of those cameras. Even if you don't, you can tell whether the card is fast.

So why are most of us buying expensive digital cameras and using cheap memory cards?

Well, I suppose that all depends on how you define an expensive camera.

$300, while expensive, is not expensive for a camera. Kind of like how $3000 is not expensive for a car.

Expensive cameras generally start at around $900. That's around where professional SLR digital cameras *start*, and go up from there. And believe me, anyone who spends $2000+ on a camera, doesn't fuck around with buying cheap cards. That's in no small part because they need very *large* memory cards to store pictures in RAW format.

"Most of us" don't spend that much money on a camera. Most of us spend around $300-$500. And thus, since we generally don't have a lot of money left over to spend, it's spent on cheap memory cards. Not that it's a big deal these days, since today's cheap memory cards are last week's hella fast and large memory cards. I just picked up a 1 gig SD card that's rated at 133x for $30. And I'm told I could have gotten it at 1/3 that cost elsewhere. Our Canon A80 has a 1x write 256M CF card from 2 years ago, and it was considerably more expensive than that.

There are a lot of different aspects to testing nand flash performance. The burst speed of a 25MHz 4-bit bus (used in original SD) would be about 12.5Mbytes/sec. But data is not written immediately to flash, but stored in a buffer. An often quoted read/write speed of 9Mbyte/sec likely involves writes to consecutively addressed blocks and the SD memory block management system has a ready supply of erased blocks. Put a filesystem on top of the NAND memory block management system, and things get more complex. Fragmentation is going to be a problem here eventually as well. Did this test do any long term testing? Another factor (for PC testing) is the SD interface. Is this over USB or and SD slot such as those found in a laptop. The peak rate may be 60Mbyte/sec, but add protocol overhead, and again, random access times can be heavily affected.
I went through this a little while ago and wrote a test program which measures peak USB flash memory performance 'under' the filesystem to as to try to attain the quoted peak speeds. I have write and read results for plain blue Sandisk (5 and 8 MByte/sec) and Lexar (5 and 4 MByte/sec) at http://s3u.sf.net/ [sf.net]

If you take 10,000 photos between taking a "once-in-a-lifetime" photo and backing it up onto a tougher media, you pretty much deserve to lose all your work. The biggest loss of digital camera images are caused by loss/theft of the camera, and user error (accidental deletion). Media failure doesn't even register on the scale.

Why does everybody test performance, but nobody tests durability? What good is a ginormous flash card that stores your images in a fraction of a second when it trashes the FAT after some 10000 writes because the flash cells can't take anymore writes. There go the once in a lifetime shots.

From what I have read, the fast cards are also the most durable. They tend to be made of the single layer CF. It's the really large but slower multi-layer CF which don't last long.

You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price. The odds are that the neither will notice the difference in performance given the volume of pictures they take.It seems to me as if nerds, with a natural ability with details are vulnerable to decommoditization of hardware, something which they're paranoid about in so

You have to wonder who's smarter. The average consumer who buys a generic card at the cheapest price (found with a lot of research) or the nerd who buys a ultra high end branded card(found with a lot of research) at the highest possible price.

The expensive high performance cards are also the ones with the 1 million erase cycles, versus the 10,000 erase cycles of the cheap CF.

So who is smarter? The person who saved 25%-75% or the person who bought the card which will last 100 times longer?

It would have to be Barry Bonds. Everyone else gets to plead "classified information" and "national security," which leaves him and Martha Stewart as the only possible criminals in the country, and Martha has already done her time. Plus he's, well, black.